Well, the new level 75 hunter talents have been datamined and are up on MMO Champion. Spiralphoenix has given us this video of them in action, too. Clearly there is still work to be done on them, but I look forward to seeing where these are taken!

Summons a flock of crows to attack your target over the next 30 sec. If used on a target below 20% health, the cooldown will be reset. 60 Focus, 40 yd range, Instant, 60 sec cooldown.

This is interesting, in spiralphoenix’s video the crows come one at a time and stack behind the dummy. There appeared to be about 15 of them, and they were level ??, so I doubt people will be able to AOE them down like they can with snake trap snakes.

When I heard about this I expected a whole flock to come at once and rush the target, maybe with the flock circling over the target before descending in a fury, not turning up dribs and drabs. The crows are a dark grey colour, not a menacing midnight black, no glowing eyes, no rending flesh animations… meh. Now, this is a petty criticism, and I’m sure I’d be more positive after a decent night’s sleep, but I still feel underwhelmed. Blizz probably has a lot of work left to do on them, and the animation might well be changed by the time this sees 5.0.

Spamming this under the 20% health mark might give me the feeling of power I want, though. I suspect it will behave the same way kill shot does, so we’ll get two pops of it and then the cooldown wont reset again.

This is definitely going to see some tweaking, unless we’re getting frost and unholy runes (I have the strong feeling this will cost us focus), you may also notice this is bugged in the video, with no cooldown. This is a burst damage cooldown too, but if it lasts 12 seconds and has a cooldown of 30 seconds we’re going to see an uptime of 40%. That’s a lot. Between this and Murder I’m sure someone will math out which is “better”. I suspect Blizzard is going to try to make Murder good for bosses with a low-health soft enrage, and Call Beast better for other boss fights. I prefer a big damage buff with a long cooldown myself, so I probably wont choose this. I like a button where I can go “ALL THE THINGS DIE NOW” rather than just one more thing I need to keep track of and press off cooldown.

Hmm, awfully familiar, it almost feels like a rogue ability… This looks as though it’ll be best for BM (assuming the pet’s buffed attack still applies), and potentially low health trash mobs: imagine having this on Beth’tilac? It wouldn’t have handled every spiderling mob but it’d have helped. 100 yard range is awfully nice, there’s been a couple of long range abilities the hunters are getting. No minimum range and now they’re increasing our maximum range, too. Bravo!

Other talents

Blizzard has done some slight tweaking to the other hunter talents too.

Level 15

The three talents here that used to let you choose what flavour damage your arrows did have now been replaced by the “disengage” tier of hunter talents from level 45, Posthaste, Narrow Escape and Exhilaration. Narrow Escape is new, and has replaced Evasiveness (100% dodge for 3 seconds when you disengage), which is no longer in game.

Both Powershot and Glaive Toss have been nerfed. Powershot now does significantly less damage, and Glaive Toss has lost its CD reset. As said above, Binding Shot is now a level 30 talent instead, and has been replace with Barrage

One Response to Level 75 Hunter Talents

I kind of like the crows. And I don’t mind the lynx either, but I can’t really see it’s use just yet. Hopefully they make Call Beast a bit more interesting. Exciting times, whole new rotations and specs and glyphs and pets and whatnot!